Welcome to the University Museum's Exploring Collections Online (ECO)

Please pardon our progress! As we endeavor to put all of our collection portfolios online, you may periodically experience broken links or missing images. We are working to correct all technical problems as quickly as possible, so please bear with us as we go through our "growing pains." Thanks for your patience and we hope you enjoy browsing through some of our collections!

The University Museum first opened in 1874 as a natural science museum. Today we have over 60,000 objects, artifacts, and specimens with University, local, regional, national, and international connections in the arts, humanities, and sciences.

Our current Exploring Collections Online Web Kiosk (ECO), allows us to share selections from the art and humanities through subject-related collection portfolios. Each portfolio includes these major sections: a portfolio introduction, a narrative about significant donor/s and collector/s, a summary of the portfolio's subject with pertinent details and research sources, and a selection of distinct object records that have detailed information as related to the portfolio subject.

To ECO, you can choose from the fields on the left side of this screen.

Click on Themes to view complete, subject-related collection portfolios that have been created by the Museum. These portfolios include all reference information about donor/s, collector/s, culture groups, geographic origins, and research sources as well as individual object information.

Click on Search to go to the search page and select what kind of search you would like to perform.

We welcome feedback about ECO. Please send comments or questions to museum@siu.edu

This project was made possible by grants from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2005, 2008, and 2011. The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's 123,000 libraries and 17,500 museums. Through grant making, policy development, and research, IMLS helps communities and individuals thrive through broad public access to knowledge, cultural heritage, and lifelong learning.

Assitance was also given by the College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University

The University Museum retains all rights to the contents of this website. Images, text, and other media are provided by the University Museum for limited non-commercial, educational, and personal uses (see the US Copyright Offices definition of "Fair Use" (www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107). Unauthorized use of images of the collections or trademarks from involved parties is prohibited. Users are prohibited from reproduction, distribution, transmission, sale, transfer, creation of derivative works, public display or performance, publication or any commercial exploitation of any materials on this site without the express permission of the University Museum.
Copyright to works may be retained by individuals or entities other than or in addition to the University Museum, and are protected under US copyright laws and applicable international treaties. The user is solely responsible for obtaining necessary permissions for use of any image or images whose copyright is not held by the University Museum.